Our Journey and Other Things

September 4, 2015September 4, 2015

Teacher Denenberg!!!

My classroom. This is one of my first grade classes.

So, we have been teaching for 3 weeks now. Time goes so quickly… whether or not you’re having fun. Lucky for me, its been about 25% not fun, 75% extra fun. In this blog I’ve posted several photos of my classes. We are encouraged to take photos of our kids for PR reasons, and I’ve taken advantage of it.

My first week I taught ESL Summer Camp grade 5&6. They were a nightmare. Then the next week was first grade orientation. It was a long, long, long week. But we got through it, unprepared, unexperienced and a little shell shocked. Teaching 7-8 year olds is nothing like I expected. Half the time I’m herding cats- they’ve never been required to sit in their seats for this long! (Oh to be young!) Something I love about my first graders, they call me “Teacher Denenberg!” They’ll see me in the hall and yell to me “Teacher Denenberg! Teacher Denenberg! Teacher Denenberg!” Then inevitably they run up and hug me. Its incredibly endearing.

Last week we started school, and it was a short week because there was a national holiday, like Labor Day. But I was able to meet my second grade classes. Second grade is so much better than first. They are little angels, all sitting in their seats, helping each other, speaking near perfect 2nd grade level English. I’m so lucky… I get to teach language arts to them, not ESL.

This little boy is one of my favorites… for obvious reasons.

What has been the most challenging about our jobs here in Kang Chiao International School is that we work for an actual school. This means meetings, bureaucracy and everything else associated with a school. Our jobs are nothing like we thought we would get with a CELTA. Somedays I feel completely unprepared and somedays I feel lucky not to work in a cram school.

My desk by the end of the day…

Sidenote: Cram schools are schools that lots of Asian countries have outside of the child’s normal 8-4 M-F school days that just focus on English or another subject. Often times children will sleep through their normal school so they can go to cram school and focus on English.

Also I’ve received two gifts from kids so far:

Also, we don’t have internet until payday. So blogs are a little hard to post. Sorry about that.